Christopher soon gave him up and the three men talked amongst themselves. The heat of the afternoon passed and a little breeze danced into the room, and the hard brightness of the sky changed to a pale primrose that had still some echo of the blue in its faint colour. The city had uttered no sound through the heat of the day, but now voices came up to the windows: the distant crying of papers, the call of some man with flowers, then the bells of the Round Church began to ring for evensong. Breton sat there, wrapped in sulky discontent. In his heart he was wretched. Christopher had deserted him; these men would have nothing to do with him. As was his nature everything about him was exaggerated. He had come to Brun's rooms that afternoon, feeling that men had taken him back to their citizenship again. Now he was more urgently assured of his ostracism than before. Who were these men to give themselves these airs? Because he had made one slip were they to constitute themselves his judges? These Beaminster virtues again--the trail of his family at every step, that same damnable hypocrisy, that same priggish assumption of the right to judge. Better to die in the society of those friends of his who had suffered as he had done, from the judgment of the world--no scorn of sinners there, no failure in all sense of true proportion. Christopher got up to go. He gave Arkwright his card. "Come in and dine one night and tell me all you're doing----" "Of course I'll come," Arkwright said. "Only you're much too busy----" "Indeed no," said Christopher. "One day next week you'll hear from me----" Breton got up. "I'll come with you," he said to Christopher. The two men went away together. When they were gone Arkwright said to Brun, "Now that's the kind of man I like----" "Yes," said Brun, laughing. "Better than the other fellow, eh?" Arkwright smiled. "More my sort, I must confess." III Christopher and Breton did not speak until they reached Oxford Circus. Here everything, flower-women, omnibuses, grey buildings, grimy men and women--was drowned in purple shadow. It might be only a moment's beauty, but now beneath the evening star, frosted silver and alone in a blue heaven, sound advanced and receded with the quiet rhythm of water over sand. For an instant a black figure of an omnibus stood against the blue and held all the swell, the glow, the stir at a fixed point--then life was once more distributed. Here, as they turned down Oxford Street Christopher broke silence. He put his arm through Breton's: "Well, Frank? Sulks not over yet?" Breton broke away. "It's all very well, but I suppose I'm to pretend that I like being insulted by any kind of fool who happens to turn up. Good God, Chris, you'd think I was a child by the way you talk to me." "And so you are a child," said Christopher impatiently, "and a thankless child too. Sometimes I wonder why I keep on bothering with you."